I totally agree with coanda, the game has the disadvantage of being a bit repetitive. Random sources game mode (or an other solution) challenge to think of new combinations less efficient than the best combinations!

Well I suppose people who lack the skills to unlock everything could always "Cheat". ;)

This is just an idea based off someone's suggestion in another thread. The game checks achievements at the end of the game regardless of how many times you reload that game. Since the beginning part is often the same it was recommend that you get your "perfect" early game run so you grab your starting advisers then save the game. Next you can simply load from that point and try for different achievements instead of restarting every time.

Well why not take that a step further. Have a game with massive amount of achievements reached already that is a couple minutes before the end of the era. They load the game provided by someone else who does have the skills and when the era finishes they get all the achievements and unlocks. I'm assuming saves work across players, though I wonder what happens when save has resource the player hasn't unlocked?

Some new gameplay modes though would be nice too.

As for better early game I think the biggest problem is adviser selection. Part of the problem is that you have to advance your giants at the same rate. This means in order to ensure you get the right advisers at the right time you often need to build specific village types only to tear them down again several minutes later in the game.

This pre-build phase in which your just doing stuff to get advisers instead of actually working towards your final build is one of the biggest time sinks and repetitive parts of the game. I think it is also the reason why some people struggle with getting the achievements. In that many less skilled players go right for the achievement and then can't get the proper advisers they need or they take too long during the early phase trying to get those key advisers.

A possible solution to this is to have shorter Eras except the later ones already have some advisers unlocked. During startup you could pick which advisers types are on which giant. This way you can jump right into the mid-late game play of racing for the achievement. It would also pose a new type of challenge in that with such higher tier resources right from the start, greed management could be a bit more difficult.

For example I hear some of the more skilled players talk about getting all 4 advisers in 60-90 minutes and spending remaining time going for the gold. I'm not sure how true the 60 minutes is as I still rarely get all 4 giants to max advisers. Of course I still have a bit to unlock and not as much free time to play as I would like.

I voted for the first option "ruins value of unlocks". I know some people like to play without any pressure (like creative mode in Minecraft), I sometimes too like to just chill out with freeplay but for me relaxing in freeplay mode is also about basking in glory of my unlocked achievements. Without that I'm afraid I wouldn't care that much for unlocks so I don't want that. I bet there will be (or already are?) trainers for your game, so people who
want that can download them and voila and I don't think that's wrong (unless they cheat and they claim that they unlocked stuff in a legit way...) .

Imagine freeplay without any unlocks, fairly pointless. Once you've unlocked everything in Era mode, what would you want from freeplay?

Freeplay isn't really what it sounds like, but instead is just no time limit without able to unlock. I would expect a freeplay mode to already have everything unlocked and not count towards achievements. It wouldn't take anything away from Era mode, because you play Era mode for the challenges. This would also open the game to more casual gamers and child audiences. Era unlocks would be useful for new game modes and challenges.

Personal experience: while I was aiming at getting unlocks, I reconsidered the way I play this game quite several times, and having a time limit made me learn and seek other opportunities, be more attentive, etc, etc, and as the result change the way I play, rather than going the same straightforward way I started with :)